What can a national literature mean for a writer who came to Belgium from Morocco? Rachida Lamrabet reflects on the legacy of Hendrik Conscience
A few months ago, I was invited to give a lecture for the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the great 19th-century Dutch writer Hendrik Conscience, the man who taught his people, the Flemish, to read. This writer played an important role in defining the identity of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.
Conscience wrote an epic novel about the brave Flemish resistance in the Battle of the Golden Spurs of 1302 against the French dominancy, called the Lion of Flanders. He wrote in Dutch, which was quite revolutionary. Flemish writers of his time, and those who came far behind him, were only taken seriously if they wrote in French.
The Flemish writer Maurice Maeterlinck, our only Nobel prize winner for literature, said for instance that the Dutch language was "un coassement de grenouilles, mis en grammaire". Or in plain English: "the croaking of frogs put into grammar". Maeterlinck wrote in French.
Conscience defended the importance of the Dutch language through his literature and played a major role in promoting the idea of a Flemish people. He adhered to the idea "that language is the whole of the people". And those who read him began imagining a nation for these Dutch-speaking people. Unfortunately, it is this very idea that divides our country today.
Conscience's legacy became an important symbol of the Flemish movement, a movement that at its worst was not afraid to ally itself with Nazism and racism. Naturally, I felt unenthusiastic towards the kind of national literature that Conscience represented. It was too often used to define a rigid notion of people and of citizens, to justify a politics of exclusion, and it caused an obsession with identity. Referring to a national literature was in my eyes referring to something archaic and closed, a monolith that would not change even if the world was changing.
I felt more comfortable with Ben Okri when he said: "I was born in the world and I'm at home in the world's myths."
So when I was asked to say something about what Conscience meant to me as a writer who came in the 70s with my parents from the north of Morocco to this brave new country, it was that idea of an almost hostile national literature that dominated my thoughts. It was a literature that I could not touch or add something to; it left no room for other stories because these other stories were simply not considered part of the national patrimony, or part of the collective narrative.
Sure, these other stories could be very interesting and informative, but they remained the stories of the others, stories from the periphery, that could never affect or alter what was considered the centre or the norm. As Marc Cloostermans, a book reviewer for one of the two important Flemish newspapers, puts it: "Sure, we like to read allochthonous writers, but only if they meet our criteria and if they make bold statements we secretly enjoy."
Here you have it, there is even a word to describe writers such as me. I'm considered to be a special kind of writer; I am an "allochtoon". Let me explain to you what that word means, because there is no equivalent for it in English. It sounds unfriendly. I can assure you, it is unfriendly.
The word allochtoon is from Greek origin and means "someone who came from elsewhere", in opposite to the word autochtoon, which is used to indicate the Flemish people and means "pure, came from the land". In this society, there is a semantic division on the grounds of ethnic origin: you either are an allochtoon, from the outside, or an autochtoon, from the land.
The only chance to get rid of the allochtoon label in this part of the world is to be a brilliant football player who leads the national team to victory and fame. I guess it's too late for me to make a career in soccer; so for writers like me, it is not obvious to just be part of that great guild of writers.
Regardless of the fact that I write in Dutch, my writing is not considered to meet the norm that has been set out by the centre. I write about identity, migration and a changing, diverse world. That is the kind of world we live in today in this country, and yet some readers and critics are convinced that my literature has nothing to do with them; that it's the literature of the others, as opposed to national literature. I write about Antwerp and readers would talk to me about my work as if I had described a world far away from them. My characters are strange exotic individuals for the mere fact that their names are Younes, Mariam and Marwan and not Isabel, Jan or Peter.
I'm not so very young any more, but I'm still very naive – and I thank God for that; that's why I decided to challenge myself for my lecture about Conscience: I wanted to emphasise the things we had in common. I wanted to draw a line between Conscience's writing then (at his time and in his troubled society, where his language was not recognised) and me writing today in my society, which has been transformed into a place where you can see the world. In Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent alone you have more than 170 different nationalities living together, and these people have brought their languages, stories and convictions with them. For me, the main question was how the dominant society reacts upon claims of recognition of one's own cultural identity. I think the way that society responds to those claims can tell us a lot about how that society defines itself and how self-confident it is in a changing world.
I had the brilliant idea, so I thought, to make a comparison between Consciences's striving for recognition and the aspirations to cultural emancipation of the new minorities in Belgium. I wanted to show how literature could be of help when you are trying to form an identity and define your place in the world.
I tried to connect the search for identity of young citizens with non-European roots and Conscience's cultural and linguistic struggle. I was convinced that in his time Conscience asked himself the same questions as the young men and women who live in the big cities in this country today. Questions like; "Who am I? Where do I belong? What is home and what does language mean to me?'"
And then of course, I went too far, I crossed the line, I came too close, and asked my audience what Conscience would think of Dyab Abou Jahjah, the former leader of the demonised organization, the Arab European League (AEL), which pushed for the emancipation of the Arabs in Europe and Belgium. Jahjah launched the provocative idea to make Arabic one of the national languages of this country. My audience, mainly white and middle class, was not amused.
That idea encountered resistance because there was the fear among the audience that their constructed national identity, a Flemish identity which had been obtained after a hard battle, would be transformed by multicultural, non-Flemish compatriots into something else. I could see the horror in their eyes. And it is also that fear that makes it difficult to really open up to other stories, to let those stories change ideas, opinions, and the way we look at things. As long as they don't get too close and risk changing the norm, then these stories are OK. But for how long can a society shut out its own reality? Not for very long, because it bangs at the door.
In fact, this evening I declined an invitation to a funeral in the city of Ghent, 31 miles from Brussels. The funeral of a word.
The city of Ghent decided, on the instigation of a few organisations and artists, not to use the word allochtoon anymore. And at this very moment, on the international day against racism, a funeral ceremony is taking place in the town hall of Ghent. After the word has been buried, there will be an enormous feast. Perhaps we could all take the train and join the people of Ghent for this celebration of the semantic birth of citizens, after all. History is made by people who have a lot of imagination.
• This is an edited version of a speech given by Rachida Lamrabet for the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference in Brussels on 21 March 2013, presented by the British Council. Full versions of all the speeches are available on the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference website.
• Next: Trinidad, with speeches from the Bocas Lit Fest
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